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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
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https://archive.org/details/canmanbechristia00pote_0 


THE JOHN CALVIN McNAIR LECTURES 


CAN A MAN BE A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 









‘ 


CAN A MAN BE ‘Afesicu seu 
CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 


BY 
WILLIAM LOUIS POTEAT, LL.D. 


PRESIDENT OF WAKE FOREST COLLEGE 





CHAPEL HILL 
THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS 
LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD 
Oxrorp University Press 


1925 


CopyricuT, 1925, By 
THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS 


THE PRESSES OF 
THE SEEMAN PRINTERY INCORPORATED © 
DURHAM, N. C. 


TO 
MY CHILDREN 
HUBERT, LOUIE, HELEN 
AND ALL WHO SHARE 
THEIR YOUTH AND 
INTELLIGENCE 


sy te 
p ee 


WAty shea ea 


AMC ALLA 
ee 





/ 


THE McNAIR LECTURES 


The John Calvin McNaw Lectures were 
founded through a bequest made by Rev. John 
Calvin McNair, of the class of 1849, which be- 
came available to the University in 1906. The 
extract from the will referring to the foundation 
is as follows: 

“As soon as the interest accruing thereon shall 
by said Trustees be deemed sufficient they shall 
employ some able scientific gentleman to deliver 
before the students then in attendance at said 
University, a course of lectures, the object of 
which lectures shall be to show the mutual bear- 
ing of science and theology upon each other, and 
to prove the existence of attributes (as far as 
may be) of God from nature. The lectures, 
which must be prepared by a member of some 
one of the evangelic denominations of Christians, 
must be published within twelve months after 
delivery, either in pamphlet or book form.” 





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CONTENTS 


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CAN A MAN BE A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 


From harmony, from heavenly harmony 
This universal frame began: 
From harmony to harmony 
Through all the compass of the notes it ran, 
The diapason closing full in Man. 


—JoHN Drypen, St. Cecilia’s Day. 


INTRODUCTION 


Three years ago almost to the day Sir 
James M. Barrie said to the students of 
St. Andrews University: “Mighty are the 
universities of Scotland, and they will pre- 
vail. But even in your highest exultations 
never forget that they are not four, but five. 
The greatest of them is the poor, proud 
homes you came out of, which said so long 
ago, ‘There shall be education in this land.’ 
She, not St. Andrews, is the oldest univer- 
sity in Scotland, and all the others are her 
whelps.”’ 

As I enter upon the privilege and re- 
sponsibility of this lectureship, you will 
permit me to say that I am thinking of the 
poor, proud, Christian homes out of which 
you came up hither, of your adventures 
here in the widening horizons of modern 
life, and of the new homes which you will 
shortly go down to build. You are the 


2 INTRODUCTION 


children of a simple-hearted, sturdy de- 
mocracy. I am wondering whether you 
will be at home in its bosom again. Will 
you return to it with more widely ranging 
sympathies and a deeper loyalty? Your 
culture would come too high, if its illumi- 
nation threw a shadow upon your democ- 
racy. And you are the children of the 
Christian faith. Its standards and sancti- 
ties and inspirations have made us what 
we are. They are the refuge and guide of 
our personal life. They are the origin and 
security of our social order, the dynamic 
of our social activities. I am concerned 
most of all to inquire whether your culture 
is going to be at home with your religion. 
This adventure of the growing day,—it is 
likely to intoxicate a spirited youth and 
absorb his enthusiasm. Will it dim and 
then put out the candle of the spiritual 
lifer And the general situation outside 
university life, the spirit and atmosphere 
of the time,—is it favorable and friendly, 
or chilling and hostile to the faith of our 
fathers? Is religion still possible? Cana 
man be a Christian to-day? 


INTRODUCTION 3 


This may be, what Havelock Fllis insists 
it is, one of the unnecessary problems over 
which people worry themselves, spinning 
webs of abstruse speculation around the 
simplest things. Why do they not ask 
whether walking or hunger is still possible? 
“Religion, if it is anything at all, must be 
a natural organic function, like walking, 
like eating; better still, one may say, like 
loving.” Nevertheless, many people are 
asking this question in a genuine perplex- 
ity. Some who deal with the facts and 
processes of external nature feel no need 
of God for purposes of explanation, and 
find Him nowhere. Some Christians com- 
ing suddenly or by degrees upon the mod- 
ern conception of the universe bristle up 
against the first phase of its hostility, then 
crumble inwardly and withdraw. And 
some of you, young and ardent, tents 
struck, out on the highways in quest of 
goodness and beauty in whatever high and 
difficult region they abide, are arrested by 
the voices of misguided prophets calling 


4 INTRODUCTION 


above the din of debate, “This way, or not 
at all!” ‘My map and chart, or disaster!” 

Under these circumstances, it may be 
useful to think first of the main features of 
our period in some detail, then to disen- 
tangle, if we may, the essential substance 
of Christianity from its accumulations 
through the centuries, recognize the travel- 
ler in the mass of his baggage, and finally 
to consider what serious-minded, intelli- 
gent young people are to do in order to 
secure and maintain abiding peace between 
their enlightenment and their religion. 
Such a proposal will, I hope, serve the 
general purpose of the John Calvin Mc- 
Nair foundation. I suggest, ane 
as our general topic the question, 


CAN A MAN BE A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 


Its discussion falls apart, after the homi- 
letic manner, into three lectures,—I. To- 
day; II. Baggage; III. Peace. You ob- 
serve that a frankly practical end is 
contemplated here; and any but a frankly 
practical method of treatment would be in- 


INTRODUCTION 5 


appropriate,—inappropriate to the philo- 
sophical limitations of the lecturer, as well 
as to the end which we seek. You will do 
me the kindness not to halt for conclusions 
at any stage of our study, but to hear the 
discussion through. 


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TO-DAY 


And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first 
heaven and the first earth are passed away; and the sea 


is no more. 
—Rev. 21:1. 


CAB. th 
TO-DAY 


Yesterday lives in to-day. As far back 
as the archeologist is able to extend the 
human story, man is still found to be man, 
woman, woman. The Sumerian men of 
three thousand years before Christ built 
them buttressed fortifications and col- 
umned palaces, fashioned war-chariots and 
battle-axes of copper ornamented with 
gold; and the ladies had their proper 
adornments of agate beads, copper hair- 
pins with animal heads, vanity cases, and 
rouge. And Sir Flinders Petrie reports 
that the finest Egyptian jewelry so far re- 
covered dates from 5500 B. C. The past 
is present. The tradition is unbroken be- 
cause human nature is unchanged. In the 
fundamentals of human life, its essential 
activities and needs and interests, the 
modern world is the ancient world brought 


10 CAN A MAN BE 


down to date. People are very much as 
they have always been, but the human 
scene is various and tangled to an unex- 
ampled degree. People are the same, but 
there are more of them than there were 
before. In the single century since 1800 
the population of the earth has grown to 
be nearly three times what it had become 
in all the millenniums before that date. 
And we are closer together than ever be- 
fore. We move about faster and bump 
into one another oftener and more vio- 
lently. Life is a grand mix-up of persons, 
classes, nations, races, with vastly multi- 
plied opportunities of cooperation indeed, 
but of antagonism and collision as well. 
Epidemics tend to become pandemic, and 
the contagion of opinion spreads rapidly 
and far. As the Japanese current softens 
the climate of California, so the material- 
ism of the West infects the thought of 
the East. . 

Obviously to-day differs from yesterday 
mainly in externals. It is the modes and 
machinery of life that are different, not 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 11 


life itself. The means of travel are more 
swift and luxurious, but the passengers 
are of the pattern and order of their grand- 
parents. Some among us go further and 
maintain that the world of men has seen 
better days. With all our mastery of 
things, we do not master ourselves. It 
may be questioned whether there has been 
any improvement of the human stock dur- 
ing the historic period. Certainly two cen- 
turies of ancient Athens produced men 
who, in statesmanship, philosophy, letters, 
oratory, and art, set standards for all 
subsequent time. Sir Francis Galton, a 
pioneer in the study of human faculty, de- 
clared that the Athenian race of 500-300 
B. C. was as much superior to the present 
English race as the present English race 
is superior to the present African race. 
Demosthenes could have handled Burke in 
debate, possibly also the orator from the 
wheat fields of the northwest who is still 
with us. The first sovereign of the Roman 
Empire would not suffer in comparison 
with the last president of the Western Re- 


12 CAN A MAN BE 


public. Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar was 
one hundred and eighty-six feet long. Bat- 
tleships are to-day one thousand feet long, 
but they carry few Nelsons. A recent 
writer pushes back the period for com- 
parison to the remote antiquity of the 
Pleistocene Epoch, when, biologically 
speaking, man ceased to be progressive, 
began, indeed, a decline of which we our- 
selves are illustrations. In physique and. 
cranial capacity the Cro-Magnon man had 
the advantage of modern man with seven 
inches more of average height and one- 
sixth more brain. 


1. SCIENCE 


The revolution which has occurred in 
the apparatus and environment of human 
life under the eye of some of us is the 
direct result of the new knowledge of 
nature. The modern scientific movement 
began in the seventeenth century. The 
progress of discovery was slow, especially 
in the earlier stages, partly because knowl- 
edge is the means and condition of knowl- 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 13 


edge; partly because knowledge must wait 
upon the production and efficiency of its 
instruments; partly because the prophets 
of the new knowledge have always been 
crucified by the scribes of old. Think of 
the long night through which the human 
spirit cowered in terror before the benefi- 
cent but veiled forces of nature. Think of 
the six centuries during which a book 
written by an Egyptian monk to vindicate 
the Bible against the heathen doctrine of 
the rotundity of the earth was the au- 
thority, not only in theology, but also in 
geography and astronomy. The monk 
emptied the Ganges into the Nile and made 
the earth a flat rectangle from the edges 
of which solid walls rose up to support the 
solid heavens! Think of the one hundred 
years’ struggle of the Copernican as- 
tronomy against the Ptolemaic tradition, 
of Vesalius and Harvey confronting with 
lonely audacity the authoritative anatomy 
going back to Galen. Think of the scien- 
tific revolution of the last century,—of its 
morning star, Lamarck, dying in obloquy 


14 CAN A MAN BE 


and privation, of Lyell planning at first to 
publish his immortal “Principles of Ge- 
ology” anonymously to circumvent theo- 
logical opposition, of the pioneers who 
accepted mockings and scourgings while 
they laid the two foundation stones of 
modern biology, the doctrine of protoplasm 
and the doctrine of evolution. The bitter- 
ness and tragedy of that struggle ended 
about 1885 in an enlightened treaty of | 
peace accepted by the leaders of the oppos- 
ing camps. Think of the breaking of that 
truce of God but yesterday by a few earnest 
and capable but misguided men who, in 
the effort to protect our most precious pos- 
session, are in reality putting it in peril. 
Are the victories of intelligence after all 
insecure? Will there never arise a gener- 
ation able to read the past and respect its 
warnings? This battle of the boundary— 
must the adventurous pioneers of the king- 
dom of truth meet resistance on every 
frontier and fight their way through 
forever? 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 15 


Another feature of this difficult advance 
must, in all fairness, be recalled. Some 
men, speaking the language of science, re- 
counting its triumphs and arrogant in its 
name, modern Rabshakehs, have left their 
proper country of Assyria to violate the 
territory of Zion, and with a loud voice 
have reproached God and insulted His 
people. Such scientists have turned phil- 
osophers without the philosopher’s poise, 
and they must take their share of the 
odious responsibility of inciting warfare 
against all science. 

Nevertheless, the frontier moves on. 
The sphere of light gets itself a longer 
radius, even though its surface meets the 
unknown in more points than ever before. 
Apart from the net achievements of 
science, may there not be a more cheerful 
view of the resistance of conservatism to 
new truth? Possibly it is a case of gaso- 
line and brakes combining to secure a safe 
advance. Maybe, the sieve of struggle 


insures us our grain of truth without grits 
or chaff. 


16 CAN A MAN BE 


What with materialism, what with con- 
servatism blocking the way, even so we 
move forward into the day. Science has 
transformed our world. It has expanded 
the universe in all directions in space and 
in time. Contrast the solid over-arching 
firmament of the ancient Hebrews with the 
heavens of the new astronomy,—limiting 
walls all down, star dust become suns, and 
the unit of measure from sun to sun the - 
distance which light covers speeding 
through trackless deeps at one hundred and 
eighty-six thousand miles a second. That 
measuring rod is five and three-fourths 
trillion miles long. We say, for example, 
that Alpha Centauri is four light-years 
away, that is, twenty-three trillion miles. 
It is a long way from the first telescope of 
Florence to the Hooker reflecting telescope 
at Mount Wilson. Galileo discovered the 
moons of our neighbor planet, Jupiter. To- 
day Dr. Hubble measures the distance 
and brightness of a star in the nebula of 
Andromeda, stationing it nine hundred and 
thirty thousand light years away in the 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 17 


illimitable universe and reporting the 
volume of its radiation four thousand times 
that of our near and friendly little sun. 
This expansion of the universe in the tele- 
scope of to-day is matched by the revela- 
tion of its materials and substance in the 
spectroscope of to-day. That wizard of 
long-range analysis identifies flaming gases 
in a star one thousand light-years away, 
and proclaims at once the unity of sub- 
stance and the reign of law everywhere, 
from “the cosmic mote” on which we spin 
in the void to Mira Ceti two hundred and 
fifty thousand miles in diameter, whose 
light reaching us to-night started on its 
journey when the British Stamp Act 
stirred the American colonies to revolt. So 
sudden and so astounding has been the 
opening out of the universe that Mr. Ber- 
nard Shaw is unable to adjust himself to 
it and professes himself skeptical of its 
methods and results. 

And what an expansion in time has 
science made! As we turn the first stony 
pages of the geological record we grope in 


18 CAN A MAN BE 


a past of unimaginable remoteness. Fossil 
human remains and the excavated me- 
morials of extinct civilizations push the 
human story back many thousands of years 
into the past. The Instructions of Ptah- 
Hotep, the oldest book in the world, was 
composed at least four thousand years 
before Christ. 

If we look in another direction, we dis- 
cover ourselves in a new world. Not so’ 
many years ago, as Mr. Belloc says, every- 
one took cheerfully for granted an eternal 
little thing called the atom. It was indi- 
visible and ultimate. Now we learn that it 
is, in reality, a system like the solar system 
consisting of a central sun, the nucleus, 
and revolving planets, the electrons. These 
ultra-microscopic electrons revolve in their 
orbits at the velocity of fourteen hundred 
miles a second. Their number varies with 
the element from one in hydrogen to 
ninety-two in uranium. By the loss of 
particles from the nucleus, the atoms of 
one element become the atoms of another, 
uranium becoming in this way successively 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 19 


eleven different elements of which lead is 
the last. In other words, the dream of the 
alchemist is about come true: one element 
may be transformed into another. These 
researches have now gone so far as to 
break down the old conception of matter 
and force and to render very vague the 
hitherto sharp distinction between matter 
and spirit. 

But mere matter whether in atomic or 
stellar systems is mere matter, marvellous 
but dead. It is in the sphere of living 
nature that the revelations of modern 
science become significant and therefore 
revolutionary. For life is Nature’s goal 
and crown. Her struggle upward out of 
war and night into order and beauty, her 
wistful brooding for ages on the insensate 
elements, all her storm and pain find their 
compensation when Life first rises to view. 
It is lodged in a tiny cell. It is frail and 
simple and poorly equipped. But she takes 
it to her bosom, warms and guards it, feeds 
it with opportunity, establishes and diversi- 
fies it with struggle, until alga and moss 


20 CAN A MAN BE 


and fern and rose, infusor and worm and 
insect and bird and man respond to her 
mother yearning from every nook of her 
wide domain. } 

In the sphere of living nature two lines 
of inquiry have been pursued more or less 
independently. One of them, concerned 
with the structure, habits, distribution, and 
relationships of living beings, began with 
the first intelligent observation of these 
creatures. It culminated about 1860 in the 
establishment of the doctrine of evolution. 
The other waited of necessity for the ap- 
pearance (1590) and perfecting of its 
great instrument, the microscope. For it 
dealt with the microscopic structure of or- 
ganisms and with that most marvellous of 
all substances, protoplasm, apart from 
which the phenomena of life do not occur. 
No great progress was made before 1839, 
when the cell doctrine was established. 
Singularly enough these. studies reached 
their culmination about 1860 in the estab- 
lishment of the doctrine of protoplasm. 
That doctrine declares that, in its essential 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 21 


properties and powers, protoplasm is the 
same, whether in the form of an amceba 
performing all the functions of animal life 
without organs, or a germ-cell carrying in 
its microscopic dimensions its freight of a 
thousand hereditary traits, or a brain cell 
thrilling with a high emotion. By this 
doctrine all the living world was unified in 
substance as by the evolution doctrine it 
was unified in mode of origin. Accord- 
ingly, modern biology dates from 1860. 
Much yet remains to be learned about 
protoplasm and evolution. Biology is a 
growing science. Since the recovery in 
1900 of the epochal work published in 
1866 by the Austrian monk, Gregor Men- 
del, research in the problems of protoplasm 
has turned mainly and with great promise 
to genetics and heredity, and no page in 
biological history is brighter with fore- 
tokens of practical blessings to mankind 
than that which records the achievements 
of these twenty-five years. So with regard 
to evolution. About the principle and fact 
of evolution there is no question in the 


22 CAN A MAN BE 


minds of responsible biologists. It is taken 
for granted, just as the Copernican as- 
tronomy, or the germ “theory” of infec- 
tious diseases. This great conception is 
embedded in the texture of the intellectual 
life of to-day. It guides our thinking in 
well-nigh all fields of inquiry and informs 
the noblest types of contemporary litera- 
ture. One wonders whether the proposal 
to disentangle and expunge it by ecclesi- 
astical or legislative enactment can by any 
possibility be really serious. But the 
method of evolution, the process by which 
organisms vary and new types arise, is 
yet unsettled. Lamarck offered an expla- 
nation. Darwin recognized Lamarck’s 
suggestion and proposed another. Eimer 
proposed another, Weismann another, and 
DeVries still another. The final explana- 
tion will probably synthesize all these. ‘As 
Bateson declared, this is a technical, almost 
a domestic problem and any day may see 
the mystery solved. Here again students 
of the way evolution works are turning for 
light to the young science of genetics, and 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 23 


a wide-ranging series of field observations 
and breeding experiments now under way 
gives promise of important results. 


2. THE APPLICATIONS OF SCIENCE 


Hardly so magnificent, but no less strik- 
ing than the expansion of our world by 
astronomy, physics, and biology, have been 
the results of the application of the new 
knowledge to the modes and machinery of 
human life. Our grandfathers would not 
believe their eyes, if they could be stirred 
from their quiet sleep and set down on 
Main Street or Fifth Avenue to-day. The 
cave men of Dordogne would be little more 
confused and helpless. 

In the seventeenth century Sir Thomas 
Browne wrote: “It is too late to be ambi- 
tious. The great mutations of the world 
are acted.’ But we know that the dis- 
coveries of science had at that time barely 
begun. Indeed, in the hundred years next 
behind us, ambitious and consecrated ex- 
plorers have mapped wider provinces in 
the continent of the unknown and added 
more to the intellectual wealth of the world 


24 CAN A MAN BE 


than in all the centuries before. And the 
great mutations of the world which Sir 
Thomas looked back upon were, in reality, 
ahead of him. Of course, pure science 
preceded applied science. And usually the 
aim of pure science is truth, not utility. 
When Cavendish produced nitric oxide di- 
rectly from the air he did not foresee how 
his discovery would later make the world 
independent of the saltpetre of Chile for 
its supply of nitrate. The vacuum tubes 
of Sir William Crookes back in the seven- 
ties were the precursors of the radio- 
therapy of 1910. The marvels of Edison 
and Marconi are descendants of the pure 
science of Faraday and Maxwell. 
Progress in the biological sciences has 
been turned to good account for the promo- 
tion of human welfare. Bacteriology has 
given us control of most of the infectious 
diseases of useful plants and animals, in- 
cluding man. Medicine and surgery, which 
are biological in their foundations, have 
enhanced the efficiency and the duration of 
life. And the young science of eugenics, 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 25 


as its path grows surer and clearer, is lead- 
ing us to the possibility of checking racial 
degeneracy and promoting positively racial 
improvement, as, indeed, it has already 
done in the case of domestic animals and 
farm and garden crops. But it is, rather, 
the progress and applications of the phys- 
ical sciences that have so notably increased 
man’s control over nature and so univer- 
sally transformed the conditions and in- 
struments of his life and work. Think of 
travel and transportation. My father, with 
his carriage and big bays, would have 
started from our home in Caswell County 
at sunrise in order to drive into Chapel 
Hill at sundown. I make it to-day in the 
Hudson under two hours. We float in 
palaces on the sea, under the sea, above 
the sea. We fly on the land, under the 
land, above the land, from thirty-five to 
two hundred miles an hour. The trans- 
mission of power, light, and heat, com- 
munication, or the transmission of intelli- 
gence by telegraph, telephone, wireless, 
radio,—these make the modern world. 


26 CAN A MAN BE 


They have widened the range of human 
interests and activities. They have in- 
creased men’s power to gratify their de- 
sires. They have increased the productive 
capacity of the average man perhaps fifty- 
fold. They supply the conditions out of 
which modern industrialism has developed, 
with its wide organization controlled from 
one centre and the close network of busi- 
ness which makes all sections of the world 
one and interdependent. Here is the 
mechanism of propaganda, mass opinion, 
and mass action; wings for light and heal- 
ing for any dark and festering areas of 
human life. Surely science is making the 
world one and new and neighborly. Is it 
not preparing the way of the people, cast- 
ing up the highway, gathering out the 
stones,—preparing in the wilderness the 
way of the Lord, making straight in the 
desert a highway for our God? If men 
were controlled by rational considerations 
and good-will, this would certainly be true. 
Men are, in fact, controlled by their in- 
stincts and impulses, by tradition and 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 27 


emotion. Pure science and its practical 
applications merely create the conditions 
under which instinct and passion compass 
their ends. Science confers power, not 
purpose. It is a blessing, therefore, if the 
purpose which it serves is good, it is a 
curse if the purpose is bad. It is clear, for 
example, that if Christian conscience does 
not end war, science will end civilization. 


3. INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL ATTITUDES 


We have seen how science pushes out the 
boundaries of human life and equips it 
with power. But there is another and 
more important way in which science af- 
fects human life. As Mr. Bertrand Rus- 
sell puts it, science may operate through an 
effect upon the imaginative conception of 
the world, the theology or philosophy ac- 
cepted in practice by energetic men. It is 
these intellectual and moral attitudes de- 
veloped in the atmosphere of science which 
we turn now to consider. 

Individualism. First of all, the new indi- 
vidualism. Nothing is more conspicuous. 


28 CAN A MAN BE 


Every man counts one, now at length every 
woman also, thank God. Special privilege 
is passed or passing, and every man is com- 
ing into his own. Emancipation from the 
restraints imposed by authority sets every- 
body free. There is much talk of personal 
liberty even in the face of the reasonable 
requirements of the public safety. One 
may think what one pleases to think and 
say what one thinks. Social conventions 
are flouted with impunity, involving often 
the standards of morality. Such indica- 
tions of extravagance are observed with 
alarm on every hand, for individualism 
without religious restraints easily passes 
into license in personal experience and 
anarchy in society. 

Democracy. This self-determination ex- 
pressing itself in the organized life of men 
is democracy. In etymology democracy is 
the rule of the people. But equal partici- 
pation in government, universal suffrage, 
and majority rule are not democracy itself 
so much as the mechanism of democracy. 
The essence of democracy is the spirit of 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 29 


fraternity and justice, which recognizes 
corporate responsibility as well as indi- 
vidual rights, and renders mass action pos- 
sible in unprecedented volume and variety. 
In earlier periods mass action was limited 
to the prosecution of wars. In the modern 
world it extends into other fields, religious, 
economic, and political. But the demo- 
cratic spirit is as yet gravely backward in 
development. It appears to exhaust itself 
within the mass and to have no surplus of 
fraternity and justice to apply to the inter- 
action of masses. For example, the moral 
law is supreme and operative within our 
national boundaries, but when Mr. Wilson 
sought to apply that law to our interna- 
tional relationships, he found the Senate 
averse and obdurate. The democracy of 
our time cannot count itself secure, nor can 
the world count it a boon, unless it can ac- 
cept or create a morality adequate to the 
guidance and control of the situation which 
it has produced. 

Internationalism. And this introduces 
us to another notable feature of the world 


30 CAN A MAN BE 


of to-day. I refer to internationalism, or 
what Mr. Wells calls the international 
mind. It may be defined as the cosmo- 
politan sense of human relations, the recog- 
nition by one nation of the rights of all 
nations, the cooperation of independent 
nations to secure their integrity and pro- 
mote their common interests. Such a 
fellowship of nations was, of course, im- . 
possible before the rise of modern sover- 
eign states in the sixteenth century. It 
was likewise impossible before the develop- 
ment of the gigantic machinery of com- ' 
munications which has gone far toward 
unifying the modern world. It may, per- 
haps, be said to have been born in the 
World War. It is now a cause, a passion, 
almost a religion. The League of Nations 
is its vital expression. That covenant was 
the greatest and most promising of human 
documents for the cooperation of all men 
against the stupidity and crime of war, and 
the promotion of the law of justice and 
fraternity among nations. American re- 
jection of it was as disastrous as it was 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 31 


irrational. Our present attitude is inde- 
fensible from any point of view. But 
international fellowships are already es- 
tablished, whether Washington gives them 
formal recognition or not. Business is in- 
ternational. Currents of the intellectual 
life flow freely across the boundaries. Cul- 
ture is cosmopolitan, human, public. To 
the horizon of culture Christianity adds 
fellowship and kindliness, sees in aliens 
brothers, and knows no boundaries politi- 
cal or racial in the universality of its 
service. 

Rationalism. Somewhat more nearly re- 
lated to our specific inquiry is the habit into 
which science has led us of bringing every- 
thing to the test of reason and relying upon 
it in all matters of belief and conduct. 
Science has grown by the rational treat- 
ment of the facts which the senses report. 
A method so victorious in the struggle 
with difficulty and obscurantism proved to 
be contagious. Formerly we consulted au- 
thority and tradition and trusted when we 


32 CAN A MAN BE 


could not see. To-day we trace tradition 
to its sources and ask of authority, “Who 
made thee a judge over us?” We subject 
religious doctrine and the interpretation of 
the Bible to the test of the rational faculty, 
just as we apply that test to all other bodies 
of literature and doctrine. And however 
partial and dangerous it may be to rely 
upon one of our faculties and ignore the 
rest, many among us add to the habit of 
rationalism the offensive attitude of big- 
otry. The rationalism of science will set 
down as absurd what it is unable to explain. 
or handle with its apparatus of the foot- 
rule, the clock, and the balance. So 
Reinach will declare that “religion is a col- 
lection of scruples which impede the free 
exercise of our faculties.” The rationalism 
of orthodoxy will deny any fact which does 
not fit neatly into its system without de- 
ranging it, will go beyond what is written 
and seek to enforce with anathemas sub- 
scription to the decrees of an alien logic. 
So Mr. Bryan will say that evolution is “a 
false, absurd, and ridiculous doctrine with- 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 33 


out support in the written Word of God 
and without support also in nature.” 
Fundamentalism. An interesting phe- 
nomenon in the religious thought of to-day 
springs out of this Western and modern 
tendency to rationalize the religious ex- 
perience. Fundamentalism is an active 
movement which it is impossible to ignore, 
even if one wishes to do so. In so far as 
it succeeds it is likely to impose on popular 
opinion the view that religion and science 
cannot dwell together in peace in the same 
mind. Such a practical result the propa- 
ganda does not seek, but it follows of 
necessity. The gentlemen who are pro- 
moting this movement appear to have 
learned nothing from history, illustrating 
a saying of the German author of the “Phil- 
osophy of History” that we learn from his- 
tory that men never learn anything from 
history. They are loyal to a closed logical 
system and are repeating a blunder against 
which the past is full of warnings, and they 
are courting the disaster which has invari- 
ably followed the blunder,—the disaster of 


34 CAN A MAN BE 


raising a perilous issue and later pulling it 
down. After a bitter resistance Christian 
theology in England came to see that the 
discovery of the method of creation did 
not dispense with the Divine agency in 
creation, and along with other human dis- 
ciplines accepted and incorporated the 
great conception of evolution. That modus, 
as we have seen, was established some 
forty years ago. But only yesterday a> 
few gentlemen, sincere, devout, and capa- 
ble, old enough to remember it if they were 
even slightly in touch with the thought of 
that period, waked up to find, as they 
thought, the scientists secretly digging out 
the foundations of Christianity. Their 
excitement and alarm spread rapidly and 
widely. Trained for the most part in pre- 
laboratory days, they could not be expected 
to have the scientific habit or attitude. In- 
voking a man-made theory of inspiration 
most unfair to the precious documents of 
our faith, and committed to a bald literal- 
ism of interpretation, they take the role of 
defenders of the faith and in its name pro- 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? Bhs 


pose, by ecclesiastical and legislative enact- 
ment, by executive order, by organized 
propaganda, by inquisition and the refine- 
ments of modern torture, to crowd the eagle 
back into the shell and then, in Voltaire’s 
famous phrase, crush the infamous thing. 
An organ of the movement announces that 
its purpose is “to drive out of all tax-sup- 
ported schools every evolution teacher and 
every book teaching evolution. It is going 
to mean war to the knife, knife to the hilt.” 
Once more the old slogan comes out of re- 
tirement—“religion or science,” ““Moses or 
Darwin.” These earnest but misguided 
men are producing no effect whatsoever 
upon scientific opinion. Their solicitude 
comes in the wrong century. It might have 
been more effective in the nineteenth. In 
another direction, however, Fundamental- 
ism is not without influence, and there lies 
the tragedy of it. It is compromising 
Christianity before the intelligence of the 
world. The young men and women who 
are trained in the laboratories of our col- 
leges and universities, so far as they are 


36 CAN A MAN BE 


affected at all, will find it difficult, under 
this interpretation, to keep their place in 
the Christian communion, or unpromising 
to enter. Without intending it, these 
ardent propagandists are, in reality, scat- 
tering thorns in the path of the young 
Greeks of our day who would see Jesus. 
We are witnessing another case of con- 
servatism putting in jeopardy the cause 
which it seeks to save. The spectacle is 
amazing and disheartening. ° 

Modernism in its newer phase is the re- 
action from Fundamentalism. As there 
are extreme Fundamentalists, so there are 
extreme Modernists. If the one says he 
believes everything in the Bible from cover 
to cover, including the covers,—everything 
read as it was written, interpreted with 
severest literalism, the other says he be- 
lieves nothing in the Bible, interpreted 
with never so much freedom of figure and 
allegory: science has displaced religion as 
religion displaced magic. These two cate- 
gories are neither exclusive nor exhaustive. 
Most intelligent Christians decline both 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 37 


labels. In French and other legislative as- 
semblies three groups of members are rec- 
ognized,—the Right or conservatives, the 
Left or radicals, and the Center, the group 
holding intermediate or moderate views. 
The Center is most likely to be both clear 
and dependable. A great artist once said 
to me, “Perfection lies midway between 
perfection and barbarism.” 


CONCLUSION 


In view of the several features of con- 
temporary life and thought with which 
we have been dealing, the impression is 
inevitable that a grave situation is de- 
veloping. There is much debate with its 
attendant confusion. Earnest purposes halt 
in indecision. A complacent indifference 
and a flippant flat denial justify themselves 
by the disagreement of the doctors. Per- 
plexity knots up many a brow whenever 
religion is mentioned, and serious spirits 
all about us respond deeply to Browning’s 
Greek poet Cleon feeling after God in the 
dark: 


38 CAN A MAN BE 


I ask 
And get no answer, and agree in sum, 
O King, with thy profound discouragement, 
Who seest the wider but to sigh the more. 


In order to forestall the impression that 
this somber discussion is merely academic 
with little relation to the concrete life of 
our period, allow me to present a transcript 
or two from life. This from Anatole 
France, but lately gone upon the great ad- . 
venture behind the veil. It is reported by 
his secretary:—‘ ‘If you could read my 
soul, you would be horrified.’ He took my 
hands into his own, feverish and trembling. : 
He looked in my eyes, and I saw that his 
own were full of tears. His face was all 
ravaged. He sighed, ‘There is not an un- 
happier creature than I in the whole uni- 
verse. People think me happy. I have 
never been happy—not an hour, not’a day. 

Do not pluck the veil from the tem- 
ple with a brutal hand. Pluck it away a 
little at a time. Riddle it with sly little 
holes. Under the pretext of mending it, 
cut away a few shreds here and there to 
make dolls with. . . . I have spent my 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 39 


whole life twisting dynamite into orna- 
mental curl-papers.’ ”’ 

There is France the man slyly cutting 
into shreds the sanctities of the world for 
the amusement of the world. One wonders 
if France the man was not France the na- 
tion, an authentic representative of a sec- 
tion of the intellectual life of the period. 

Here is another human document, a let- 
ter of three months ago from a former 
pupil: “In the past several years I have 
not gone to church very often as I do not 
find the sermons very satisfying—mostly 
concerning heaven, which the average 
preacher does not paint as a very attractive 
place, hell as about what I imagine a steel 
mill to be, and God as a very small person 
indeed—always vengeful and_ seeking 
every excuse to punish the puny creatures 
He has made. I have three children of 
Brains Oi better intellicence.s: 4) ike. wl 
also have several friends. . . . What I 
want to ask of you is that you will give me 
the main points of the talk you made here 
in F years ago, and also of what you 





40 CAN A MAN BE 


said sometime later, etc. . . . If youcan 
give me this in words as simple and yet as 
fully carrying your meaning as your lec- 
tures on biology were given fifteen years 
ago, you will be doing Be children and my 
friends a great kindness.” 

A little later this letter was read on an 
acute friend of mine, with the suggestion 
that it was a typical human document. He — 
replied, “I know it’s so! Many men of my 
acquaintance don’t go to church because 
they hear so much they know to be untrue 
and because they get no good from it which | 
they are able to recognize. Old people will 
say, ‘But you ought to go to church,’ and 
the judgment is enforced by appeal to pro- 
priety and convention now. A little further 
back the appeal was to business advantage, 
still further back to torture. The preacher 
says, ‘You ought to believe,’ and proceeds 
on the assumption that he ought to make 
you believe what you ought to believe. And 
when you say you do believe, why, then, by 
jingo! you are saved! But I maintain that 
is not religion, but a form of social con- 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 41 


trol. Many people define religion as social 
control invented by kings and priests to 
keep the people in order. . . . A closed 
mind is made the test of loyalty. It is so 
in all spheres, as well as in religion.” 

By this time you are charging me with 
spreading a pretty drab coat of paint over 
a pretty bright world. But I beg you to 
remember two thing's: it is wise to take a 
frank look at things as they are, for they 
present the factors of the problem before 
us; and cloud and fog have a transient 
sort of habit, they pick up and go. 

The fog comes 

On little cat feet. 

It sits looking 

Over harbor and city 

On silent haunches, 

And then moves on. 
If the night is dark, the morning waits a 
little below the rim of the horizon. In mid- 
Atlantic a ship met us near midnight in 
fog and a rolling sea, and we picked up her 
wireless message: “Fair weather forty 
miles ahead!” 


ee 
Tee an 


Pe ity 
ay 


i 
] 





II 
BAGGAGE 


The Bible’s teachings are so infinitely superior to those 
of the sects, who are just as busy now as the Pharisees 
were eighteen hundred years ago, in smothering them 
under “the precepts of men” . . . The Bible contains 
within itself the refutation of nine-tenths of the mixture 
of sophistical metaphysics and old-world superstition 
which has been piled around it by so-called Christians 
of later times, 


—Tuomas H. Huxtey, Agnosticism: A Rejoinder. 


CHAPTER II 


BAGGAGE 


The first lecture undertook to present 
frankly the chief features which distin- 
guish our time and make it new and 
revolutionary. The task was one of de- 
scription. The task now in hand is one 
of analysis and discrimination. If we suc- 
ceed in finding the right answer to our 
question, “Can a man be a Christian to- 
day?” we need to discover the essential 
and characteristic matter in the Christian 
designation. 

In its passage through these twenty cen- 
turies from East to West, through varying 
levels of culture and types of social organ- 
ization, everywhere meeting a new oppor- 
tunity with a fit instrument of service, 
moulding the situation but taking on some 
of its complexion, Christianity, from being 
simple and inchoate as it was at first has 


46 CAN A MAN BE 


come to be complex and elaborately organ- 
ized. It has accumulated much baggage, 
useful and in most cases necessary, but 
baggage nevertheless; and baggage is not 
traveller. Some baggage has been fastened 
on it by secular agencies. There have been 
unnatural entanglements and _ alliances. 
And so, as a thoughtful English writer 
observes, Christianity in its official presen-_ 
tation is a smothered religion, smothered 
almost to the point of collapse. It is im- 
portant to penetrate these accessories and 
recover the passenger out of the mass of 
his luggage, especially as what he has 
brought along into the new situation is the 
cause of the trouble. He cannot get 
through the scientific gateway of the 
modern world with all the load he carries. 


1. ANALYSIS 


Christianity is to-day a complex concep- 
tion. There are as many ways of looking 
at it as there are factors in it. For our 
purpose these factors are reducible to four. 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 47 


One may think of Christianity, first of 
all. as an inward experience. The spirit of 
man meets in harmony the spirit of God 
mediated and interpreted by Christ. God 
in Christ calls to the soul of man, the deep 
above us challenges the deep within us, and 
we respond in love and loyalty. That fel- 
lowship of kindred spirits is religion, the 
Christian religion. The experience is 
fundamental and universal. From that 
point springs the new life in Christ. I ven- 
ture to think it the essence of Christianity. 

Again, one may think of Christianity as 
a discipline, a rule of life, a standard of 
conduct. The standard is set up and illus- 
trated in the Christian Scriptures. We 
say, “That man is a Christian,” meaning 
he lives as a Christian. A Christian civili- 
zation is one which recognizes the Chris- 
tian standard of morality. That standard 
is absolute and inflexible, but there has 
been in Christian history a widening of the 
range of its application and influence, so 
that to-day the entire individual and social 
life of man is held to be amenable to its law. 


48 CAN A MAN BE 


Christianity may be thought of as a 
body of teaching or doctrine, in which case 
the names of theologians of different ages 
and different philosophies rise into con- 
sciousness. The Christianity of Athan- 
asius is not the Christianity of Augustine, 
though they had the same Christian ex- 
perience and the same standard of morals. 
The difference lay in their different points. 
of view when they came to account for 
the Christian experience in terms of intel- 
lect. This religious theorizing proceeds on 
the level of the interests and intellectual 
equipment of the time and in the nature of 
the case needs to be revised with every 
important change of scene. 

And then Christianity is a historic move- 
ment which originated in the life, teaching, 
and death of Jesus. When we so consider 
it, we think of a force organizing itself for 
a specific task, of agents and agencies and 
methods, of stages of extension and prog- 
ress, of territories where its banners have 
been set up, of areas of human life, like the 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 49 


industries and politics, which remain to be 
won. 

Of these four factors or elements of the 
aggregate which we call Christianity, some 
are clearly absolute and incapable of addi- 
tion or subtraction. They are not pro- 
eressive and must remain what they have 
hitherto always been. The characteristic 
features of the Christian experience, for 
example, have the universal quality of God 
and the human soul and are everywhere 
the same. So the absolute standard of 
Christian morality. Other elements are in 
their nature progressive and have suffered 
modifications and made acquisitions in the 
course of their passage through the centu- 
ries, as, for example, the body of Christian 
doctrine and the organization of the 
Christian movement. When, accordingly, 
Christianity is considered as embracing all 
these elements, namely, an original revela- 
tion of God in Christ, an absolute code of 
conduct, a system of thought, and an 
organized force taking effect on the plane 
of history, it presents a richer content in 


50 CAN A MAN BE 


the twentieth century than it presented in 
the first, and, be it especially noted, more 
points of contact with contemporary life 
and a wider area for criticism and attack. 


2. ACCUMULATIONS 


It is the way of all beginnings to leave 
no record. The first stirrings of the Chris- 
tian movement are scarcely an exception.. 
Jesus was content to trust the new life 
which he inspired to find its fit external 
embodiment. He had given his first 
friends no plan of organization, and so for 
a period there was little more than the 
spontaneous gushing of the fountain of 
life in “the paradise of the regenerate.” 
When the meager record opens we get 
only glimpses of this paradise, the most 
authentic and the most beautiful phase of 
the Christian movement. It is seen to be 
also the simplest. The little group which 
Jesus had infected with his spirit and ideal 
and attached deeply to His person were at 
first hardly more than a joyous fellowship 
in memory of Him. They were held to- 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 51 


gether not by bands of formal organiza- 
tion, but by the warmth of a common 
attachment. This first simplicity could not 
last. The inward experience required ex- 
pression and imposed a task in the world 
outside, and more formal organization was 
inevitable. The first steps of organization 
were taken in response to an acute social 
demand. The Seven were appointed to 
make the Christian impulse effective in the 
care of a dependent section of the com- 
munity. The progressive development of 
the features and activities of the church 
resulted from the same vitality and in- 
herent wisdom of the Christian impulse. 
It meets a new situation with new appa- 
ratus; it responds to the challenge of a 
new opportunity by creating an appropri- 
ate agency. This process, begun early, 
continues. to) the, present time: ) Weare 
familiar with the result,—the enormous 
elaboration of structure and function, the 
multiplication of churches and other Chris- 
tian institutions and of types of cooper- 


52 CAN A MAN BE 


ation and control in the varied scenery of 
modern Christendom. | 

The routine of worship, or ritual, 
through which the Christian life seeks to 
maintain and refresh itself is another illus- 
tration of the law of growth from simple 
to complex. The worship of the first 
Christians consisted of singing, prayer, the 
observance of the two original rites, and 
the recital of the words and works of 
Jesus. Even now, in some Christian com- 
munions, as Quakers and Baptists, this 
original simplicity is preserved. Else- 
where ceremonial has been added to cere- 
monial, spectacle to spectacle, liturgy to 
expanding liturgy, until now the complex- 
ity of Christian institutional life is matched 
by an intricate and gorgeous ritual. 

But of all the impedimenta which Chris- 
tianity has accumulated these two thousand 
years, the largest in volume and heaviest in 
mass, the most confused and confusing, is 
the speculation which has developed about 
the Christian experience itself and the 
world of external nature, under religious 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 53 


sanctions. It began early. Jesus does not 
speculate; He announces. He does not 
seek to convince, but to win. When, how- 
ever, in the flaming career of Paul, the 
Christian movement escaped the horizon of 
Syrian intuition, it had to vindicate itself 
before the mystic cults of Asia Minor and 
a little later at the bar of Greek philosophy. 
In the synagogue and marketplace of 
Athens Paul! was in the home of philosophy 
and was compelled to “reason with them 
that met him.” And when he would pre- 
pare the way for the visit to Rome he 
sends beforehand the great apology for his 
gospel. But here, as elsewhere, his resort 
to argument is not primarily concerned 
with the intellectual satisfaction of a 
closely reasoned body of doctrine, but 
rather with the practical result of securing 
a favorable hearing for his message. This 
transient and practical necessity was mis- 
interpreted as setting an authoritative ex- 
ample and justifying in the field of the 
new religion the rationalizing habit of the 
West, and in the short space of one hun- 


54 CAN A MAN BE 


dred and fifty years Christianity became a 
philosophy, whereas it was originally only 
a new dynamic and way of life.. 

Through all the subsequent eras of po- 
litical revolution and advancing culture of 
the Western world, the body of Christian 
doctrine has grown under the hand of men 
of genius. This speculation of necessity 
reflects throughout all the stages of its de- . 
velopment the political situation and the 
intellectual outlook of the time. Witness 
the tinge of imperialism in medizeval the- 
ology, and the erroneous astronomy and: 
biology surviving in some schools of the- 
ology even to-day. And so it has come to 
pass that an enormous elaboration of opin- 
ion and theory now hangs about the im- 
mediate clear word of Christ like a cloud 
on Mount Mitchell. So dominant and ab- 
sorbing is this mass of speculation that 
Christian teachers give their energies 
largely to the elucidation of its intricacies 
and seem to read the original documents 
of our faith not infrequently to find texts 
in support of a view or system of views 


AO CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 55 


already adopted on other grounds. This 
theorizing goes beyond what is written 
and, like the rabbinic commentaries on the 
ancient Hebrew law, is sometimes held to 
be as sacred and authoritative as the writ- 
ten word. It shifts the emphasis of Chris- 
tian interest from the point where Christ 
left it, from conduct to opinion, from life 
to logic. It substitutes the dictation theory 
of the Scriptures for the undefined fact 
of inspiration. It extends the aim of reve- 
lation to cover the facts and processes of 
nature, which are open to human research, 
and holds the phenomenal language of the 
Bible to strict scientific accountability. 
The simple New Testament pictures of the 
Christian consummation become, in the 
revived Judaism of the time, an elaborate, 
mechanical, spectacular, political scheme, 
the modern counterpart of what Jesus re- 
pudiated under the most solemn sanctions. 
The tragedy of Calvary, where our Lord 
laid down his life to win ours,—the wonder 
of infinite love and the mystery of Divine 
suffering do not protect that most sacred 


56 CAN A MAN BE | 


spot in history against vulgar invasion, and 
one hears even there the clatter of logical 
apparatus seeking to determine how the 
Cross becomes efficacious, a clatter only a 
little less profane and alien than the 
gambling of the soldiers for the seamless 
robe. 

Under this sort of guidance we have 
been conducted into three morasses where > 
some perish and many flounder helplessly. 
Look at them briefly. Here is, first, the 
morass of difficulties engendered by a 
theory of the Bible strangely surviving 
after it was thought to be permanently put 
to rest many years ago. On this theory the 
unmatched and divinely authoritative lit- 
erature of the religious life is held to be, 
in all its varied forms, the very words of 
God dictated by Him to amanuenses whose 
responsibility ended with the prompt and 
accurate transcription of the transcendent 
Divine communication. What was re- 
quired for such a responsibility was care- 
ful penmen. Accordingly, God Himself is 
responsible for all Biblical statements. 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? By, 


And since He knows all things past and to 
be and is truth of truth, whatever the Bible 
says about the heavens and the earth and 
the living beings on the earth, as well as 
about religious life and duty, is strictly 
true in outline and detail and to be taken 
literally as it stands now on the printed 
page. 

See into what embarrassments and gro- 
tesque absurdities this dictation theory 
leads. It requires us to accept sunlight 
before the sun was made. It makes the 
vaulted sky a solid firmament supported by 
pillars. It teaches spontaneous generation, 
announcing that “the earth brought forth” 
beasts and creeping things, as well as grass 
and herb and tree. It requires us to be- 
lieve that the seed dies in germinating, that 
the writer of Ecclesiastes anticipated Wil- 
liam Harvey, that the seat of emotion is in 
the intestines, that reflection is a function 
of the kidneys, and that the reproductive 
organs are in the small of the back. 
Prophets foresaw specific political move- 
ments and scientific inventions of our time, 


«58 CAN A MAN BE 


Nahum automobiles and the Apocalypse 
bombing airplanes. The Bible has been 
quoted against the rotundity of the earth, 
against its motions, its celestial position, 
its antiquity, against the progressive vari- 
ation of organisms in the course of their 
descent from their parents, against the 
historic rise of the human race out of sav- 
agery through barbarism up to the civilized | 
state. 

On this dictation theory of its origin, the 
Bible is reducible to a book of puzzles. If 
isolated texts are skilfully manipulated, 
and a scrap here is matched to a scrap 
there, the craziest of fancies—Anglo- 
Israel, successively chosen dates for the 
world’s end, the millennium pre or post— 
acquire Biblical foundation and sanction. 
- What wonder that many young people, 
finding the Bible so compromised and de- 
eraded by some of its professional inter- 
preters, struggle in a bog of perplexity in 
the dark, when they have right to be 
standing on the rock in the sunlight. 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 59 


Closely connected with the confusion 
and distress of an untenable view of the 
Bible is the embarrassment which current 
speculation produces by insisting, in the 
name of religion, on an untenable view of 
the world. Illustrations of this view have 
just now been presented. The specula- 
tion, sporadically surviving even yet, was 
formulated in pre-scientific days. It cov- 
ered the whole range of human activities 
and interests and the whole domain of the 
physical universe. For the determination 
of all questions and issues these theorists 
did not go out to see, they went in to read. 
Was not the Bible the compendium of all 
truthr They had, accordingly, a theory of 
creation, of astronomy, of anthropology, of 
disease, of history, of language, of educa- 
tion. But these matters were all sections 
of the territory belonging of inherent right 
to science, they were all concerned with 
scientific material. When Science came at 
length, wide-eyed and foreordained to vic- 
tory, and broke in upon this academic 
speculation, the battle was joined at once. 
This position was won by science, then 


60 CAN A MAN BE 


that, this feature of the system was sur- 
rendered, then that, until it may now be 
said that the whole territory is in the pos- 
session of science. The night of battle was 
now and again lurid with martyr fires. 
There were humiliation and the tragedy of 
lost faith, distress, and hopeless wandering. 
And, now that certain Christian teachers 
are reviving the dictation theory of the | 
origin of the Bible and endeavoring by its 
use to recover a small area of the scientific 
territory, namely, the method of creation, 
we are again in the morass out of which 
we struggled painfully nearly a half cen- 
tury ago. Some veterans of the old war 
are rallying to the old slogan. Some who 
do not quite understand what the trouble 
is about are a little aloof and dazed and 
trembling. The enemies of Christ smile, 
when they are not hilarious, that a few un- 
important men are able to lead so large a 
secession back to the wilderness. And 
some, trained and capable, serious and 
independent, at sight of such a spectacle 
lump all sections of Christianity and say, 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 61 


“To the wilderness with the whole of it!” 

A third morass into which current re- 
ligious rationalism plunges us remains to 
be pointed out. The characteristic and es- 
sential thing in any religion is the soul’s 
apprehension of the spirit world and re- 
sponse to it. In Christianity God and the 
enveloping spirit world are mediated to 
our apprehension by Christ, and to be 
Christian is to respond in love and loyalty 
to the appeal of Christ. With this deep 
and inscrutable experience the rationalism 
of orthodoxy has been very free and very 
sure. You must do so and so, you must 
accept this and that intellectual proposition, 
you must understand the metaphysic of 
“the plan,” or you cannot become a Chris- 
tian. What may be called the psychology 
of conversion is “explained” at such length 
that the plain man, who is little interested 
in metaphysics, is the more confounded, 
especially because he perceives no change 
of personal attitude to Christ even though 
he gives genuine assent to the propositions. 
Inaction follows confusion, and Christian 
interest perishes in the bog of speculation. 


62 } CAN A MAN BE 
3. DISCRIMINATION 


If we undertake now to distinguish be- 
tween Christianity and its accretions, and 
seek the passenger in the mass of his bag- 
gage, let us agree upon certain preliminary 
considerations. What is here spoken of as 
baggage is important, some of it inevitable 
and necessary. We are not appraising it, 
but recognizing it. If setting it apart ap-— 
pears to discredit it, the discredit is only 
such as attaches to means as compared with 
the ends which they serve, to tools in rela- 
tion to the man who uses them, to explana- 
tion and theory in relation to fact. In all 
probability, Christianity could not have 
reached us without its accessories. It can- 
not now escape them wholly. It is, per- 
haps, not desirable that it should, certainiy 
not in some cases.. And yet, in view of the 
general situation which we now face, it 
must be insisted that analysis and dis- 
crimination are not only legitimate, but 
imperative. For Christianity has been 
haled into court, and some of its defenders 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 63 


are gravely complicating the issue. The 
criticism of Christianity is mainly criticism 
of what has come down to us along with it. 
When it is said that the old religion is out 
of place in the new world, is it religion 
itself or the philosophy of religion that 
looks odd? Is the Christian experience 
alien and illogical in a world of science? 
Is it not, rather, this or that phase of 
Christian theology? 

Let me illustrate. The science of botany 
is a beautiful and noble science. It has, 
moreover, been greatly serviceable. It is 
a growing science. The stages of its de- 
velopment are associated with great names 
in along history. The botany of Solomon, 
who lectured on a wide range of plant life, 
was an advance upon that of the first man, 
who dressed and kept a garden of the 
Lord’s planting by the headwaters of the 
Euphrates. Theophrastus made his con- 
tribution, Linnaeus his. And so _ the 
science grew with Schleiden and Sachs and 
Gray on into the modern period of Coker 
and Coulter. But important as the science 


64 CAN A MAN BE 


is and interesting as its expanding history 
has been, botany is one thing, plant life 
quite another. If a malicious, discriminat- 
ing fire should worm its way through all 
the libraries of the world and destroy the 
last book of botany, if a malicious, dis- 
criminating infection should kill every 
botanist in the world, would the plants 
know about it or be seriously affected by. 
it? Would they not still bloom in vigor 
and beauty from where they wash their 
pretty feet in the Atlantic, over our eastern 
savannas, up the slopes to the summits of 
the Appalachians where the winds of the 
West blow through their pretty hair, across 
the Mississippi valley and the plains, up 
among the big purple ribs of the Rockies, 
and over to where they wash their pretty 
feet in the Pacific? 

And so the life of the spirit in Christ is 
one thing, your account of it in the terms 
of any metaphysical system quite another. 
The Christian impulse is one thing, its ex- 
pression in ritual and an organized move- 
ment to establish the reign of Christ in the 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 65 


life of man is quite another. The agencies 
and institutions of Christianity are not 
Christianity, but its tools. And remember, 
Christianity must have its tools. The Book 
of religion is one thing, men’s theories of 
its origin, purpose, and interpretation are 
quite another thing. Accordingly, a man 
may be a Christian without being attached 
to any of the historic churches. A man 
may be a Christian, and worship in the 
solitudes where no pomp of chanting pro- 
cessions and stately liturgy intrudes upon 
the secret session of the soul with God. A 
man may be a Christian and not know any 
more of what has occurred in the deeps of 
his nature than that a radiant peace has 
followed there upon a new personal attach- 
ment and a new alignment of interests. A 
man may be a Christian and not under- 
stand the phrases of your theology and be 
wholly unable to subscribe to its main 
propositions. 

This is not to say that Christian meta- 
physics is without interest or value. The 
contrary is true. Moreover, none of us is 


66 CAN A MAN BE 


able to contemplate the religious life in its 
origin, development, and expression, with- 
out falling to some sort and some degree of 
theologizing. But whether this specula- 
tion is true or not, able to quote Biblical 
texts or not, useful or not, necessary and 
inevitable or not, we are not now concerned 
to determine. Our concern is to see that 
it is distinguishable from essential Chris- 
tianity, so that, if it should be ignored, or 
discredited, or refuted in part or in whole, 
Christianity would not share its fate. I 
seek merely to indicate its position and limi- 
tations. And this is the more necessary 
because the gentlemen who have exercised 
their rational faculty in this strictly human 
science seem to be forever in peril of as- 
suming for it a credit and a finality to 
which it has no claim. They seem inclined 
to set up an unwarranted and mischievous 
issue: if you do not accept the theory, you 
reject the fact; if you do not approve the 
emendation, you deny the original; if you 
do not admit the conclusions of this Chris- 
tian rationalism, you are a “rationalist” ; 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 67 


if you insist that the deep things of God 
and the human spirit are vital and defy 
logical manipulation, you deny the super- 
natural even in the act of asserting it! 
This confusion is responsible for much 
of the unhappiness of Christians and the 
ineffectiveness and the injustice of the his- 
toric church. The warring factions of 
Christianity were born in this confusion. 
In it were written the darkest pages of 
Christian history, which we would fain 
never turn again. Many a man who loved 
Christ passionately and trusted Him in a 
- boundless peace has been whipped out of 
the Christian fellowship because he could 
not assent to the interpretations of men no 
more infallible than himself, and has come 
not infrequently to acquiesce in the judg- 
ment and has gone down to history with 
the stigma of infidelity attached to his 
name. It is not unlikely that the defection 
of most of the “atheists” and “infidels” of 
the Christian centuries began in identi- 
fying Christianity with its current rep- 
resentation. They would probably have 


68 CAN A MAN BE 


accepted a different and juster represen- 
tation. The deep and mocking revolt of 
Voltaire, for example, was his reaction 
from the inhumanity with which dominant 
European Christianity sought to shackle 
the minds of man. Some of you have seen 
the little Christian church which he built 
near the front gate of his estate at Fer- 
ney. It bears the inscription, “Deo Erexit 
V oltare.” 

Another discrimination, obvious but 
pressing for recognition. A man may be 
a Christian and accept the Divine author- 
ity of the Bible for the religious life, and 
at the same time reject the world view for 
which it is sometimes made responsible. 
The literalistic interpretation of the Bible, 
holding its phenomenal language to strict 
scientific accountability, issues, as we have 
seen, in a body of opinion which is in 
square and vivid conflict with the assured 
results of modern science. This interpre- 
tation 1s promulgated with passionate de- 
votion to the integrity of the Bible in the 
presence of the “scientific peril.’ Banners 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 69 


are up, enlistment is pressed. Arsenals of 
_ argument are established and open. Propa- 
ganda is organized and financed and skil- 
fully led and effective over wide areas in 
individual and mass opinion. A practical 
crisis is precipitated. A Southern theolo- 
gian solemnly warns us that Christianity is 
at the cross roads. Sir James G. Frazer 
declares that religion, regarded as an ex- 
planation of nature, is displaced by science. 
But who regards religion as an explanation 
of nature, who but the literalists leading 
this propaganda? 

We must be careful not to offend against 
the spirit of Christ when we lay bare the 
tragic mistake of some of His friends who 
know not what they do. Here also we 
need to discriminate,—between motive and 
deed: respect the one, deplore the other. 
We ought to show courtesy to the feelings 
of men whose opinions we repudiate. 
Nevertheless, the issue is too grave, the 
perplexity of college and university men 
and women too deep, and the discredit of 
Christianity too shameful, for us to be 


70 CAN A MAN BE 


mincing it around with our respectabilities. 
Responsibility has got to be fixed. If that 
responsibility imposes any degree of per- 
sonal discredit, it would lie, I fancy, in the 
region of information and not involve sin- 
cerity and nobility of purpose. If Christ 
is likely again to be betrayed in the house 
of His friends, however unwittingly, with 
however heroic a loyalty, the betrayal must - 
be exposed at all risks. And if fore- 
shadowed disaster is averted, transformed 
by any happy chance into a blessing, all 
will share in the common advantage, liter- 
alist and liberal alike, even as they share 
the common hope of the Gospel. 

In the distress and confusion of this 
crisis, three alternatives present them- 
selves. You may hold by the authority of 
the Bible in the field of astronomy, geology, 
physics, chemistry, physiology, and_ bi- 
ology, and flout the science of the time. Or 
you may reject the authority of the Bible 
in all fields on account of its discredit in 
the field of science. Or you may revise 
your conception of the origin and purpose 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 71 


of the Bible and so retain your reverence 
before its Divine authority without em- 
barrassment before the assured results of 
science. The last alternative is the only 
one which it is possible to adopt. 

Let it be noted, first of all, that the Bible 
itself gives no support to the view that it 
was dictated word by word, God speaking 
Hebrew to some of His amanuenses and 
Greek to others. New Testament writers 
refer to their predecessors in the authorita- 
tive literature of religion as “inspired of 
God,” as ‘moved,’ to write. So Peter 
speaks of Paul as having written letters 
“according to the wisdom given unto him.” 
Paul himself declares that some of the 
things which he wrote were not even “‘in- 
spired.” In the introduction to the first 
volume of his history of the beginnings of 
the Christian movement, Luke justifies his 
undertaking the task by the careful study 
which he had given to all the sources of 
information, specifying tradition from the 
original eye-witnesses and written narra- 
tives. These writers do not go beyond an- 


72 CAN A MAN BE 


nouncing the fact of inspiration. They do 
not give us so much as a definition of the 
term, much less a theory of the extent and 
method of inspiration. The nearest ap- 
proach to a description of the process of 
inspiration occurs at the beginning of the 
Letter to the Hebrews: “Many were the 
forms and fashions in which God spoke of 
old to our fathers by the prophets,” indi-. 
cating a variation in the degree and method 
of the process itself. 

And there is no warrant of Scripture for 
the literal, mechanical method of interpret- 
ing these precious documents of our Chris- 
tian faith, claiming for them meticulous 
accuracy and finality in every statement 
referring to the facts and processes of 
nature. We have already seen to what 
absurdities it forces us, for the method in- 
sisted on at any point must be applied at 
all points. Besides, it violates the funda- 
mental canon of all interpretation, namely, 
that the purpose of the writing is the guide 
to its meaning. The Bible says, not what 
it says, but what it means to say. To in- 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 73 


terpret it outside the range of its religious 
purpose is as unfair as it is stupid. We 
have, moreover, the decisive authority of 
Christ. In manifest impatience with the 
wooden-headed interpretation of His pic- 
torial language, He announced the princi- 
ple of all interpretation when He said, 
“The words that I have spoken unto you 
are spiliu -antwarceiiie, of Lhey are!not 
formal and mechanical, but fluid and vital; 
they say what they mean to say. The letter 
killeth, the spirit maketh alive. 

We are, perhaps, prepared now to con- 
sider specifically a matter which has all 
along been present in our minds, the capital 
example of the conflict between the Bible 
and science. It is the Genesis account of 
the creation in relation to the doctrine of 
evolution. Browning’s acute and heretical 
old bishop exclaims, 


How you’d exult if I could put you back 
Six hundred years, blot out cosmogony, 
Geology, ethnology, what not, 

(Greek endings, each the little passing-bell 
That signifies some faith’s about to die), 
And set you square with Genesis again! 


74 CAN A MAN BE 


The Book of Genesis, according to Hast- 
ings, is a collection of the earliest traditions 
of the Israelites regarding the beginning 
of things, particularly of their national his- 
tory. The Divine inspiration of the writer 
is shown in his fashioning of this material 
into a vehicle of instruction in the knowl- 
edge of God. Genesis stands in the fore- 
front of what Mr. Wells calls the most re-. 
markable collection of ancient documents 
in our possession. In the forefront of this 
book stands the picture of the beginning of 
the world, beyond question one of the 
noblest poems in the literature of mankind 
and one of the high lights of the Divine 
Revelation. It is poetic in imaginative ap- 
peal and in form. The eight works of 
creation are presented in formal symmet- 
rical arrangement, four in one division of 
three days and four in a parallel division 
of three days, the last day in each division 
presenting two works. Its elevation and 
dignity set it in sharp contrast with the 
Babylonian story of creation, with which 
it has, nevertheless, some affinities. 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? vo 


There is no need of detailed discussion 
of it here. But some of its features do 
require to be recognized. You notice, first 
of all, that the creation of the world and 
its inhabitants was not instantaneous: it 
occupied time. Further, the creation was 
progressive, simplest forms appearing 
first, most complex last. No process or 
method of creation is given; only the last 
terms, the finished products, of the process 
are reported. The main point and purpose 
of the whole is to affirm the Divine Agency 
in the process from beginning to end. 
First and last, one may say that this is 
practically all the writer is concerned to 
say. It is as if he had said in general, 
with some pictorial details, “Look about 
you. All you see, physical universe and 
living creatures, all resulted from the will 
and power of God.” The details of the 
picture represent the highest level of the 
intelligence of the time, and he takes them 
as he finds them. They are incidental to 
his purpose. He is concerned with them at 
all only because they can be made to illus- 
trate and declare the glory of God. 


76 CAN A MAN BE 


Viewed thus in outline and interpreted 
within the scope of its purpose, the first 
chapter of Genesis is in remarkable accord 
with modern science. It gives no dates, 
and so allows for the antiquity of the earth 
demonstrated by geology. It recognizes 
the progressive unfolding of the life of the 
planet through time. Its silence on the 
method of that unfolding is a challenge to. 
human wit to discover it. And now, with 
evolution recognized at length as the 
method which God uses in creation, we re- 
turn to this ancient word of God with a 
new reverence for its inspiration and a 
nobler view of the Divine Wisdom and 
Power—and find ourselves “set square 
with Genesis again.” Finding out how 
God makes things does not dispense us 
from the necessity of having Him to make 
them. We are still dependent upon the 
Divine Will and Power to initiate and 
energize and guide the process of evolution 
through to its final products. To the cate- 
chism question, ““Who made you?” we may 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 77 


d 


still reply, “God made me,” although we 
now know how. 

But in breaks a group insisting on verbal 
details and clamoring for evolutionist blood. 
One sympathizes with their loyalty to the 
truth as they see it, and weeps at the 
havoc they spread. Must they have details 
because God dictated them to an ancient 
amanuensis? See what follows. All the ef- 
forts which have been made to bring these 
primitive creation pictures into formal 
agreement with modern science bear the 
marks of unnatural forcing. They are, as 
a Biblical authority declares, but different 
modes of obliterating the characteristic 
features of the story. To say that the light 
created on the first day was cosmic light 
produced by collision of the molecules of 
the primal nebula, leaves unanswered the 
question: How were the first and second 
days marked before the creation of the sun 
and moon for that function? And the 
firmament or vault of heaven, solid and 
rigid enough to support an ocean of waters 


78 CAN A MAN BE 


above it? And green plants growing on 
earth before the sun, on which they de- 
pend, is set in the heavens? -And birds 
which are a higher type than reptiles and 
appear later in geological time precede 
them in the order of creation. The term 
‘day’ with evening and morning limits 
would never have been thought of as mean- 
ing a geological period but for the exigency. 
of the dictation theory when men began to 
turn the pages of the geological record. 
The men who are raising again this 
issue need the advice which Cromwell gave 
the Presbyterians of Scotland: “Pray God 
to teach you that it is possible for you to 
be mistaken.” They misunderstand the 
doctrine of evolution and its implications. 
They discuss it with glaring misstatements 
of fact. They misrepresent the status of 
the doctrine in scientific opinion and appear 
unaware of its universal acceptance in the 
lay intellectual world. With Rhadaman- 
than pomposity and finality they consign 
to the eternal fires all who hold “the God- 
defying, soul-destroying scientific guess.” 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 79 


The resurgence of this obscurantism in the 
twentieth century under the Christian 
name calls for protest and rebuke, not con- 
temptuous but firm, compassionate and 
brotherly but uncompromising. The atti- 
tude of resistance to the enlightenment of 
the world exposes itself to the ridicule of 
the world and can hardly hope to escape 
it. To such an attitude in his day Erasmus 
spoke a bitter word: “By identifying the 
new learning with heresy, you make ortho- 
doxy synonymous with ignorance.” Nor 
can men escape the odium of their misin- 
formation, or the crushing responsibility 
of causing the little ones to stumble—the 
little ones who have no defences against 
official dogmatism calling on God. There 
is a blazing passage about millstones and 
necks and the deep sea. Christianity arose 
in the best culture of its time and, when 
its teaching and spirit have been truly rep- 
resented, it has been the nourishing mother 
of the best culture ever since. It is un- 
fair and unjust that it should bear now 
the deep discredit of the new fanaticism 
which verily thinks it is doing God service. 





Ill 
PEACE 


Our faith ought to be larger than our speculative rea- 
son, and take something into her heart that reason can 
never take into her eye. 


—S. T. CoLermnce, Aids to Reflection. 


CHAPTER III 


PEACE 


The peace of which we think now is not 
the peace of surrender, nor the temporary 
agreement to cease firing. It is, rather, 
the peace of understanding, the peace 
which follows the discovery that friends 
have been fighting one another in the dark. 
The friends are not merged by the peace. 
They retain their distinctness and indi- 
viduality. Religion is religion, and science 
remains science. They are the two ways 
of relating oneself to reality, the intuitive, 
or religious way, and the rational, or scien- 
tific way. In the one case, you perceive 
without process; in the other, you under- 
stand by research. They are distinct, but 
not antagonistic; permanent phases of our 
life standing apart, not mutually exclusive, 
btit complementary. Christianity and mod- 
ern science have greatly enhanced the 


84 CAN A MAN BE 


wealth of mankind, and we shall not be 
called on to surrender either. There can 
be no feud between them. 

This is no counsel of cowardice, no pro- 
posal of the terms of a flabby, ignoble 
peace. It is quite true that a fighting 
Christianity is a heroic Christianity: the 
battle done, nobility gone. Take the chal- 
lenge of difficulty and peril out of life, and 
out goes life itself. You may make re- 
ligion cheap by making it easy. “Our cur- 
rent apologetics,’ says Principal Jacks, 
“playing for safety and shunning every 
position that makes the least call on the 
heroic spirit, render the conception of God 
less worthy holding in exact proportion as 
they make it out ‘easier’ to hold. This is 
the standing danger of all apologetics. 
They tend to cheapen their object by the 
very means they take to render it credible. 

. For this reason we need to be on 
our guard when the business on hand is 
that of accommodating religion to science. 
Religious belief makes a demand on the 
heroic spirit. Scientific belief does not. 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 85 


Whence the danger lest, in bringing re- 
ligious belief to the form in which science 
can smile upon it, we kill the nerve of re- 
ligion itself. It is possible for religion to 
be too deferential to science in this mat- 
ter.’ But one ventures to ask whether 
there is not some confusion here. Science 
occupies itself only with second causes, and 
so is not an arbiter of religion. As we 
have heretofore observed, science reviews 
only those conceptions which relate to the 
objects and processes of nature. And even 
in this restricted province science, as we 
shall see, is recognizing its limitations. It 
cannot deny the miraculous, for it does 
little else than present examples of it. All 
it can demand in any particular case is that 
the testimony be sufficient. We are not 
proposing to accommodate religion to 
science, but that religious teachers recog- 
nize the authority of science in its proper 
sphere, just as scientific teachers ought to 
recognize the authority of religion in its 
proper sphere. It is not heroic for a the- 
ologian to believe what is not true, though 


86 CAN A MAN BE 


an early Latin father professed to believe 
what was impossible. | 


1. THE IMPLICATIONS OF SCIENCE 


The Faith of Science. Science is impos- 
sible, if nature is capricious. It proceeds 
on the assumption that nature is under- 
standable. You may call this assumption 
the faith of science. We have an ineradi- 
cable bias in favor of uniformity, an in- 
ward demand for order, a deep-seated 
faith in the unity and regularity of nature. 
Science cannot explain its faith. Neither 
can it get on without it. It is distinguish- 
able from the beliefs of science, which con- 
stitute the body of scientific opinion. The 
beliefs of science,—they are its rationalized 
observations. The faith of science,—it is 
the intuitive apprehension of the intelligi- 
bility and consistency of the external uni- 
verse. And one cannot avoid asking if, in 
some of its aspects, it is not analagous to 
the faith of religion, which is the intui- 
tive apprehension of moral and spiritual 
realities. 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 87 


Adventure in Science. The finest thing 
about youth is its inextinguishable thirst 
for adventure. That spirit establishes all 
the frontiers of human life and -moves 
them on from conquest to conquest. It is 
at once the highest endowment of youth 
and its greatest peril. That curious Eng- 
lish genius, William Blake, says that the 
palace of wisdom stands on the road of 
excess, and young men seem to believe it. 
They must know the world, all of it, for 
themselves. They must drink all the cups 
of experience—to the dregs. So imperious 
is this call that now and again they come 
to the tragedy of sacrificing character on 
the altar of intellect. Tragedy, I say, for 
the experience of sin is not power, but de- 
pletion; the harvest of wild oats is wild 
oats a hundredfold, of the wind, the 
whirlwind. 

Similarly the opportunity of adventure 
is the fascination of the scientific career. 
The army of workers in all the fields of 
science is held inflexibly to unrequited toil 
by knowing that it is forever on the verge 


88 CAN A MAN BE 


of discovery. Pasteur’s face will shine on 
the threshold of his laboratory. Walter 
Reed will go smilingly to his death, if he 
can run Yellow Fever to its hiding and kill 
it there. To-morrow the mystery will be 
solved. To-morrow the jungle will open 
out into clear spaces. To-morrow precious 
energies now running to waste will be util- 
ized for human well-being; the enemy 
which ravages the childhood of the race 
will be caught and dispatched. That elu- 
sive wizard, Life, hiding among the intri- 
cacies of protoplasm,—we shall trap him 
shortly, and force from him his zonian 
secret. To-morrow the mighty Hand at 
work behind the veil will be grasped. 
Recall your own adventures with the 
erowing day, the stages of your enlarging 
intellectual life, their exhilaration and ex- 
pansion. Those interpreters of life and 
nature, the poets,—do you remember when 
you first met Longfellow, or singing Ten- 
nyson, or Browning buoyant and robust, 
or myriad-minded Shakespeare, or rebel 
Ibsen throbbing with ghostly terrors, or 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 89 


Euripides “with his drippings of warm 
tears’? Recall your personal explorations 
in the realms of science. With what eager- 
ness you put your first question to the test- 
tube and got your answer of a precipitate 
falling into view out of nowhere. Recall 
your first sight of a dividing nucleus and 
the splitting of that marvellous thread of 
chromatin with mathematical precision and 
the parting of chromosome from sister 
chromosome for their destination at oppo- 
site poles of the cell, and you asked, How 
knoweth protoplasm mathematics, having 
never learned? How the universe ex- 
panded in the telescope. What wonders 
flashed in beauty in the spectroscope. And 
that dance of the electrons within the 
boundaries of an atom, those- viewless 
waves that travel through eternity. And 
that larger universe of conscious person- 
ality—have you put your little boat out a 
little space from the shore of that silent sea 
to be awed by its expanse and mystery? 

I have said so much about the adven- 
tures of the growing day and the lifting 


90 CAN A MAN BE 


and widening of horizons of personal ex- 
perience and the totality of scientific prog- 
ress, in order to say with the more emphasis 
that horizon is another name for religion, 
the extension of the human horizon to in- 
clude God. Religion is the adventure of 
overleaping the boundaries of the physical 
life into the boundless life of the spirit 
world. And progress in religion is the 
progressive expansion of the spiritual 
horizon and its increasing reaction of fas- 
cination and control on the human spirit. 

The Apocalypse of Wonder. The Apos- 
tle John wrote one of the great books of 
the Christian literature. The Apocalypse 
has been deeply sinned against by its liter- 
alistic interpreters, who, of course, over- 
looked its method and purpose in the 
search for proof-texts of views acquired 
elsewhere. It is a pictorial drama of the 
ultimate triumph of the young Christian 
movement in spite of the Roman Empire’s 
effort to exterminate it. Animals, real and 
mythical, and other features of the physical 
world are used as symbols of historic per- 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 91 


sons and forces and movements. It is a 
panorama painted on the four walls of the 
universe, and in elaboration and splendor 
of imagination maintained on an elevated 
plane, it stands as mere literature along- 
side Milton and Dante. But, as Brown- 
ing’s Paracelsus would say: 


God is the perfect poet. 
Who in creation acts out his own conceptions. 


The story of the creative acts of the Su- 
preme Poet, it is the business of science to 
write. Science is a book of marvels. Some 
think of it as excluding the miraculous in 
human life and nature. It includes the 
miraculous. Science occupies itself with 
phenomena, that is, with manifestations, 
appearances, with the ponderable, the 
measurable, the temporal. But these are 
surface matters. Before the central mys- 
teries in all departments of inquiry science 
is as helpless to-day as Aristotle was. It 
does little but raise the curtain on wonder. 
Consider some examples. 

No two persons are alike, father and 


92 CAN A MAN BE 


son, sister and sister, even though they are 
twins. Every individual is unique. What, 
now, is the secret of this individuality? 
There is the all but infinite variety possible 
from the commingling of the factors con- 
tributed by the two parents, the four 
grandparents, the eight great-grandpar- 
ents,andsoon. More than seven thousand 
factors, or genes, are known to be present 
in the germ-cell of the fruit-fly. Then 
there are the hormones, or secretions of 
the ductless glands, controlling develop- 
ment of parts and vigor of functions. And 
living matter itself is essentially a mixture 
of proteins, which themselves show num- 
berless combinations of the twenty-odd 
amino-acids and diamino-acids forming 
protein molecules. There appear to be 
special proteins for every species and for 
every individual in a species, suggesting a 
chemical basis of individuality. Add end- 
lessly varying psychic factors, for mind is 
as real as metabolism, and we should be 
ready to admit that our scientific analysis 
lacks equipment for reducing such com- 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 93 


plexity to simplicity. The most authentic 
and intimate of all things, my self, eludes 
and baffles me. 

And He formed man out of the dust of 
the ground. The transformation of life- 
less matter into living matter is the ever- 
recurring miracle of life. Is the original 
appearance of life in a lifeless world a 
whit more difficult to explain? In assimi- 
lation life is, indeed, already present and is 
itself the active agent in lifting the inor- 
ganic material into the living state: proto- 
plasm makes more protoplasm. But the 
method, or process, of the change remains 
a mystery. Here, as in the first creation 
of life, inorganic elements enter a higher 
combination in a more elaborate architec- 
tural plan. In the one case, you see the 
thing happen; in the other case, there was 
no observer present to make note of the 
marvel. According to a well established 
intellectual habit, we resort to the Divine 
Agency in the latter case, we dispense with 
itin the former. I hold God to be present 
in both. 


94 CAN A MAN BE 


The simplest and commonest things in 
the world, says Havelock Ellis, are the 
greatest miracles. And he adds that he 
knows no greater miracle than the slow 
emergence of a complete new human being 
into the world, and that all our scientific 
jargon, instead of explaining, covers up 
the mystery. 

Three mornings ago I was in a garden» 
of poppies. Some of the poppies were just 
breaking out of the bud sheath and 
smoothing out the creases of their confine- 
ment. Many spread their silk banners to 
the day, the earth-glory answering vari- 
ously to the glory above. The banners 
were white and grey and salmon and scar- 
let with iron crosses at their centers. And 
the honeybees wrought furiously in the 
gold of the stamens making the best of 
their transient opportunity. And some, 
weary of excess of happiness and beauty, 
drooped slumbrously and were falling into 
forgetfulness, while their ancient wisdom 
and secret energies made sure that such 
fleeting rapture should be renewed from 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 95 


generation to generation. Your botanist 
admitted to the hidden springs of new life 
comes out with swelling words of fertiliza- 
tion and chromosomes and determiners and 
epigenesis, but they merely cut the edge off 
his ignorance of the secret which he would 
like to reveal. 

Think of the atom once more. FElectro- 
magnetic laws seem no longer to hold in 
the domain of the electrons, and the new 
adventures in the continent of the atom 
have broken down the distinction between 
mass and energy, and between the phe- 
nomena hitherto associated with matter, 
electricity, and the ether. Thomson and 
Millikan and associated explorers have 
keen eyes and searching methods, but they 
find that breaking down walls merely opens 
to view wider spaces of wonder. And the 
universe of sun systems, illimitable and 
radiant, think of that. Kepler and New- 
ton and Einstein have figured much and 
explained nothing. 


Deep under deep forever goes, 
Heaven over heaven expands. 


96 CAN A MAN BE 


And here comes forward again the doc- 
trine of evolution, the law of change from 
simple to complex, or in eddies backward. 
It is applicable everywhere, to the stellar 
universe, to sun systems in it, to individual 
members of systems, to all each member 
holds of physical feature and living being. 
A mathematical friend used to tell me that 
all possible curves were covered by one 
formula, and so his science echoed and 
supported the ancient Scripture, ‘The 
Lord is one God.” Of the same bearing 
and import is one of the messages of evo- 
lution. Another bears testimony to the 
presence and activity of God in His world. 
Indeed, the most impressive external evi- 
dence of God which I know is the pro- 
eressive integration of physical nature, the 
crowning of it with life, and the hedging 
in and directing of unfolding life until it 
issues in the moral and spiritual faculties 
of man, a creature made in the image of 
God, in possibility his friend. Accord- 
ingly, Sir Arthur Thomson declares that 
the modern idea of a God of evolution is 
bringing us back to the God of our fathers. 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 97 


The veil is thinning betwixt this and 
that, betwixt here and there. One cannot 
help thinking of the universe now as at 
bottom a continuum, having its knots of 
concentration and plexuses indeed, but 
passing as one essence through all space, it 
space remains, and through all eternity. 
Coral islands join hands under the sea. 


2) THES VISION OF FAITH 


Defimtion. As faith is fundamental in 
Christian experience, its definition is of 
the highest importance. Unfortunately 
the term is widely used as being synonym- 
ous with belief. We speak of the Chris- 
tian faith, of the faith of our fathers, 
meaning of course a certain body of be- 
liefs. The word has been so used in these 
lectures. But it needs to be sharply dis- 
tinguished from belief. Belief is assent to 
intellectual propositions supported by evi- 
dence. In the presence of a given body of 
evidence the mind acts automatically, as- 
senting, if it is satisfactory, that is, con- 


98 CAN A MAN BE 


vincing, dissenting if it is not convincing. 
To change the mental attitude, it 1s neces- 
sary to change the evidence, or the concep- 
tion of the evidence. Beliefs may influence 
character, or they may not. That depends 
on their object and importance. The pro- 
ficiency of the Scotch, for example, in the 
game of golf has been explained by their 
severe training in theology, but I hae me 
doots. And one recalls the Scripture 
which indicates that the beliefs of devils 
effect no revolution in character or habits, 
but only make them shudder. Creeds are 
assembled beliefs, brought together by 
gentlemen more or less qualified to draw up 
the formal statement. They cannot bind 
the mind. They may or may not satisfy 
the mind. They neither save nor feed the 
soul. 

Faith, on the other hand, is concerned 
with the essence of the Christian experi- 
ence. There is no definition of it in the 
Bible. The Bible is not a book of defini- 
tions. The nearest approach to a definition 
is, rather, a description and occurs as an 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? a 


introduction to the catalogue of its heroes 
in the Letter to the Hebrews. In Moffatt’s 
translation, the important words are these: 
“Faith means we are confident of what we 
hope for, convinced of what we do not 
see.” That is to say, faith sees what is not 
visible, makes real what is not yet a fact. 
On the basis of this authoritative descrip- 
tion, I venture upon this definition: Faith 
is the deep-lying capacity to apprehend the 
eternal world and respond to its appeal. 
Which stands in general agreement with 
Matthew Arnold’s definition, “the power 
of holding fast to an unseen power ot 
goodness.” The apprehension of faith is 
immediate, intuitive, non-rational. It is 
analagous to our likes and dislikes, our 
loves and hates. 


I do not like thee, Doctor Fell ; 
The reason why, I cannot tell; 

But this I know, and that right well, 
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell. 


Reason is convinced by evidence and 
argument and so the attitude of belief is 
established. Faith is evoked and won. 


100 CAN A MAN BE 


We admire with reasons, we love without 
reasons. I have no pronounced objection 
to Principal Jack’s view of faith, as “‘rea- 
son grown courageous,—reason raised to 
its highest power, expanded to its widest 
vision. Its advent marks the point where 
the hero within the man is getting the 
better of the coward, where safety as the 
prime object of life is losing its charm, 
and another Object, hazardous but beauti- 
ful, dimly seen but deeply loved has begun 
to tempt the awakened soul.” But I won- 
der if such elevation and extension do not 
amount to its conversion into another 
power. I prefer the Biblical conception. 

Another distinction. The body of beliefs 
is subject to the criticism of science. Faith 
is independent and is as reliable in its 
sphere as reason is in its sphere. And it 
has transforming power. It is always 
victorious. 

An illustration or two will make clear 
the distinction between faith and belief. 
You say you believe the Bible, accept what 
it says. For has it not set the standards 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 101 


of individual and social life in the leading 
nations of the world? And you know that 
it finds you, as Coleridge said. In other 
words, you are convinced of its reliability 
by such and such considerations. If you 
have faith in the Bible, you bathe in its 
spirit, find inward refreshment there. 
You confide with Abraham, you are loyal 
with Moses, you are responsive with 
David, weep with Jeremiah, aspire with 
Isaiah, flame with Paul, pray and love with 
Christ. 

Again, one may believe a doctrine and 
have no faith in it. For example, you ac- 
cept the doctrine of the existence of God. 
The infinite expansion, order, and beauty 
of the universe are to you sufficient evi- 
dence of an infinite Orderer. But to have 
faith in God is to feel Him near, so near as 
to see His smile of approval, or hear His 
whisper of reproof. They tell us that one 
out of every seven stars so far examined 
with reference to this matter is a member 
of a binary system, the star you see and 
a dark and larger companion. The two 


102 CAN A MAN BE 


revolve about a common centre. Faith 
recognizes God as an invisible companion, 
holding life with an infinite attraction and 
determining the sweep of its orbit. 

These beautiful affections, so true and 
tender, these yearnings for perfection, 
these hopes too fair to turn out false, 
justify, in your view, the belief of an im- 
mortal life where they are fulfilled. You 
consider the present life a meaningless 
tragedy if it ends all. But to have faith in 
immortality is to have the spiritual life 
surround and control the earthly life, to 
live in the eternal world while our feet 
walk the earthly pathways. 

The results of the confusion of faith and 
belief through all the Christian centuries 
have been disastrous. The scientific crisis, 
as we have seen, is one of its results. The 
discouragement of earnest minds seeking 
the Christian life and the distressing doubt 
of Christians themselves have likewise re- 
sulted from the usurpation of an alien logic 
in the field of the religious experience. 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 103 


Achievements. When we come to speak 
of the achievements of faith it is difficult 
to speak too strongly. It is a means of 
knowledge where knowledge is most funda- 
mental. It is a means of satisfaction in 
time of confusion and darkness, a means 
of hope when despair would otherwise 
possess us. There is but one kind of faith 
and that is always the victory. The men 
who have had a grasp on practical affairs 
and a vivid apprehension of the eternal 
world, the practical mystics, have always 
been invincible. Faith gives superiority to 
external circumstance. It is always light 
in darkness, assurance where we cannot 
see. It walks in peace through perils with 
its hand in the Father’s hand. It takes up 
the heaviest burdens because the Father 
helps. Under abuse and misunderstand- 
ing it smiles, “He knows.” It sees deep 
vistas through the blank wall of death, 
salutes in happy tears the loved ones on 
the eternal highways. And Christ, the 
brother of our souls,—faith sees Him 
beckon from the summits where He walks 
in light; it spurns all low aims, knits our 


104 CAN A MAN BE 


wills to His purpose for the world, and 
knows that some good day, somewhere in 
the illimitable spaces of His domain, we 
shall wake in His likeness for we shall see 
Him as He is. | 

The apprehension of the eternal world 
and the addition of its boundless horizon to 
the narrow earthly life is mediated and 
facilitated by Christ. He is Himself a 
sample of it. He came out of it, walked 
our lowly pathways under the handicaps of 
our humanity, won our hearts, and then 
withdrew into the heavenly spheres carry- 
ing thither our confidence and love. He 
showed us the Father, opened a way of ap- 
proach to Him, and made free and easy 
commerce with the eternal world. 

We need to remember, moreover, that 
in the days of His flesh He was sympa- 
thetic with all the features, phases, and 
moods of external nature, which in His 
immortal life He had created by the word 
of His power. That attitude and interest 
sanctioned scientific investigation. He 
ministers to every section of man’s nature, 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 105 


and proposes to control all its relationships. 
He is, accordingly, concerned with all the 
content and environment of human life. 
So must His representatives be. One day 
there flashed in splendor through His mind 
all the historic kingdoms of the world while 
He meditated plans of His own. He told 
the official of the Roman Empire that His 
Kingdom was not political, or local, or ma- 
terial. He was King of all those who were 
open-minded to the truth. And this King 
of the truth-seekers declared Himself to be 
the embodiment and illustration of the 
Truth. He who spoke the creative word 
of light in the beginning said, in the full- 
ness of time, “I am the light of the world.” 
Here, in effect, the Master asserts the 
fellowship of religion and learning, and 
imposes upon all who follow Him the 
obligation of the widest possible culture. 


CONCLUSION 


If you ask me what is a man of intelli- 
gence to do in this scientific period to pre- 
serve peace in the family of his ideas, I 


106 CAN A MAN BE 


answer in one word: Consider Jesus. 
Press through a thousand professional in- 
terpreters to Him, see Him at His gracious 
ministries, hear His original, unamended 
word. If A or B or Cor D intervene and 
protest “Who are you to ignore the suc- 
cession of the rabbis and set aside the 
ancient formula?” answer, “Only a lover 
of the Truth bent upon lighting my taper 
at the Master light, only a limping follower 
trying to keep in sight of Him, only a 
happy slave responsible to his Master alone 
and not another.”’ 

The Master Himself recognized the 
competency of the individual when he 
asked, “Why even of yourselves judge ye 
not what is right?” And Paul complains, 
“Why is my liberty judged by another con- 
science?” James exhorts us, “So speak 
and so do as men that are to be judged by 
the law of liberty.” Press through to 
Jesus. You will find Him the type of the 
manliness and beauty of the race irradi- 
ate with supernal goodness and power. 
Withal, how tender He is and yearning. 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 107 


And do you not recognize the stigmata of 
a compassion which sought you beyond the 
gates of death? He has the words of 
eternal life, words possessing as well as 
imparting eternal life. They have the gift 
of perpetual contemporaneousness. No 
matter how wide-ranging and deep-run- 
ning your culture, it can never get beyond 
them. Nor will they ever suffer discredit 
in the widening horizon of modern science. 
They may be briefly summarized. 

One of these words is that God is our 
Father with a genuine solicitude for His 
wayward children. If you would see the 
Father, look at Me, He says. He affirms 
the spirit world and presents a sample, so 
that commerce with it is open and easy. 
Another word is that the divine require- 
ment is summarized in love. Another, that 
He came not to limit life but to give life, 
to heighten its quality and enlarge its 
volume. Still another, that the law of life 
is the law of the Cross, and that the task 
of life is to proclaim the Gospel of the re- 
demption of all life in Him and to minister 


108 CAN A MAN BE 


to all the forms of human need, forestalling 
them and correcting the conditions out of 
which they arise. For He said, “As the 
Father hath sent Me, even so send I you.” 
And this message of the teaching 1s illus- 
trated and extended by the message of the 
sacrificial life and death. 

You will see that we have here not a 
system of thought, or a body of opinion, or 
a set of conclusions reached at the end of 
argument, but the challenge of the eternal 
world. The appeal is not to reason, but to 
faith, that deep-lying central capacity to 
see the invisible, to apprehend the envelop- 
ing realm of spirit. Deep calls to deep, 
and if deep answers to deep, it is not be- 
cause we are convinced, but because we 
are won. 

Whatever happens, whether the rabbis 
confound you with their metaphysics or 
specialists in science, that is, men with no 
horizon, undertake to cloud the clearness 
of your Christian allegiance and hope, you 
will find peace if you discriminate between 
Christ and some of His interpreters, if you 


A CHRISTIAN TO-DAY? 109 


discriminate between personal attachment 
to Christ and men’s explanations of it, if 
you discriminate between the field and 
apparatus of science and the immediate ap- 
prehension of moral and spiritual realities 
in the vision of faith. 

And never lose faith in light. It is the 
condition of life. It is the best medicine, 
the best policeman. There is no foulness 
and festering in the light, nor any tyranny. 
Light is emancipation. Did not the King 
of the truth-seekers say, “Ye shall know 
the truth, and the truth shall make you 
ince; yu Dnerevisino tear inoht,’ forall 
light is of God, and those who fear are in 
darkness. The deepest of all infidelity be- 
cause it comprehends all other forms is the 
fear lest the truth be bad. Donotbeafraid 
of the effect of enlarging knowledge upon 
acquisitions already made or upon long- 
cherished beliefs. That sort of timidity is 
an impeachment of the majesty and har- 
mony of the sum of things. Besides, the 
old knowledge, after the manner of all life, 
will organize itself about the new revela- 


110 CAN A MAN BE 


tion. Establish, if you can, outposts in 
every province of the intellectual domain. 
Dare to look into any dark recess, to walk 
on any far-looking crest in God’s universe, 
for you will find Him everywhere in pro- 
portion to the penetration and range of 
your vision. If a ray of the infinite efful- 
gence dazzles you into confusion and fear 
lest the light be darkness, hold fast your 
confidence, and you will come to see it melt 
in a white peace into the enveloping sea of 
light. Do you hesitate on the threshold of 
a dark experience? Remember the shadow 
is black because the sun in bright. If your 
path of light descends into the valley, and 
a mist of confusion and tears lies palpably 
athwart it, drive in, with the assurance of 
Paracelsus: 


If I stoop 
Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud 
It is but for a time; I press God’s lamp 
Close to my breast; its splendor soon or late 
Will pierce the gloom; I shall emerge one day. 


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